January 30, 2005

I’ll be doing the LMB radio show again this Monday, January 31, 2-4pm PST, at KillRadio.org. Music and politics, you know the deal. I’ll do my best to get the show recorded, uploaded and possibly podcasted in the next few days.

[update]

… or not. Looks like the Kill Radio website is down, which means I can’t do my show. Sorry, maybe next week?

January 26, 2005

The Iraq Election Primer- title says it all. An FAQ about the upcoming Iraqi elections. Hint: they’re not electing a new president.

WMDUH!- Matt Taibbi writes about the media’s treatmetn of the news that the US has given up looking for WMDs in Iraq. He points out that: a) the media keep referring to this news as “little noted”, conveinently ignoring the fact that it is they themselves that did the noting, b) that although there was four months of erroneous pro-war coverage, there will only be about 10 minutes of “whoops, we were wrong” coverage, c) that the media is structured in such a way that nothing even remotely like b) could ever happen, and most importantly, d) he answers the tortured “how did we go wrong?” question the media are pretending to ask themselves:

The answer is this: You lied!

It’s really as simple as that. Everyone knew it was bullshit. I defy Bill Keller to stare me in the face and tell me he didn’t know the whole Iraq war business was a lie from the start. Whether or not there were actually WMDs in Iraq is a canard; this was essentially unknowable at the time. It was the rest of it that was obviously idiotic, yet even the pointiest heads in the business, like the folks at the Times, swallowed it with a smile…

The problem wasn’t a small, isolated ethical error, like Judith Miller’s Chalabi reporting. The error here was not a mistake of fact. The problem was that a central tenet of our system of news reporting dictates that lies of consensus will never be considered punishable mistakes. In other words, once everyone jumps in the water, a story acquires its own legitimacy.

And now we get papers like the Times wondering aloud why they didn’t feel the ground under their feet. Answer: you jumped in the water. And you knew what you were doing.

A Demobilized Press in a Global Free-Fire Zone- Tom Engelhardt runs the interesting site TomDispatch.com, where gets all sorts of smart writers to submit insightful pieces. But for some reason, Engelhardt thinks that these pieces are improved when he slaps 2-10 paragraphs of his own introduction onto the front of these articles. He is wrong. Quite frankly, I find his intros so off-putting that I have decided not to link to some truly fascinating articles, just because I wouldn’t expect anyone to wade through his extra nonsense.

That being said, this article is a piece by Engelhardt and just Engelhardt. He takes about ten times as many words as he needs to, but he does present an interesting point: not only does the American press fail at educating its audience about the world around us, it usually can’t even bring itself to mention more than two countries in a single article. For example, almost any article about Iraq could very reasonably mention the ways that current events will influence and be influenced by the United States, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. But that sort of depth and complexity is very rare, and thus Americans remain stupid.

Civil Liberties Myopia- short history lesson for folks who’ve only become politicized since the Bush presidency: attacks on Americans’ civil liberties came long before W and 9/11.

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004- kind of arbirtary, deciding which corporations are truly the worst, but the article does contain a lot of good info about corporate abuse in 2004 that you might have missed.

What Kind of Freedom?- Christian Parenti titled his new book about the Iraq war after a quote from his Iraqi translator:

“Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don’t know what to do with all this freedom.”

The article above is an interview with Parenti about his thoughts on Iraq, given his experience both with the US troops and Iraq, and his time spent with the insurgents.

And Now for Something Completely Different- a happy story. A young hippo stranded by the tsunami was rescued and brought to a zoo in Kenya, where it has now apparently become fast friends with the zoo’s ancient, humungous tortoise. I think that’s neat.

Apparently the security situation in Baghdad is so bad that a plane carrying Iraq’s Minister of Defense was turned back due to heavy fighting near the airport. The nation also seems to be suffering from an overabundance of irony.

Oh, and remember how we returned soveriegnty to Iraq in June of 2004? And y’know how Iraq is having an election in less than a week? Wonder how that squares with this:

“The U.S. Army expects to keep its troop strength in Iraq at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years”

This protest was taking place in downtown San Diego. I drove down after work, but was nervous for several reasons:

- I don’t know downtown San Diego very well
- I don’t know the San Diego activist scene at all
- this planned protest was against the law

It was a two-part event. The first part would be a cacerolazo in front of the Horton Plaza shopping center, followed by a “Day of the Dead”-themed Reclaim the Streets event.

A cacerolazo is a stle of protest taken from the streets of post-collapse Argentina, where people make a ruckus, primarily through the noise of banging pots and pans together. It can get deafening.

The “Day of the Dead” theme was supposed to be about honoring those who had died due to the Bush administration. The organizers encouraged folks to come in either the Latin American Dia de los Muertos tradition, or Irish wake style. As it turned out, there was very little of either.

Reclaim the Streets events are politically-themed block parties in which activists take over city streets with clever tactics. The main goals of RTS actions are: demonstrate that public space belongs to the public; make people see how different things can be than they actually are; and general disobedience. No one gets permits for RTS events, they either happen or the police scare everyone away (or arrest them).

Not too long after my arrival at the protest, I stopped protesting. I felt like I was learning. The activists who were helping to stage the RTS action were smart, and I watched how they helped set events in motion. People with video cameras were set up near all the large cop contingents, to discourage the police from harassing or hurting the protesters. Sound systems were hidden in small hand carts and wheeled around. The plans spread informally by several activists going through the crowd and saying “at 7:20, everyone go out into the middle of the street.” Growing crowds of people crossed the street at the crosswalks, increasingly blurring the lines between “walking on the sidewalk” and “marching in the street”. And then, bicyclists snaked through stopped traffic, again blurring the lines of where people and machines are “supposed” to be.

When the crowd finally walked into the street, the cops went nuts. Maybe 100 of the 400 or so noisy activists stepped off the sidewalks, and a half dozen cops chased them back. Then the cops closed down the entire city block, leading to the most surreal moment of the day: the police protecting an empty strip of blacktop. They were keeping us off because, I guess, we’d be in the way of traffic. But they were already stopping the traffic from entering this block anyway. The activists were crowded onto two narrow strips of cement, connected by asphalt, but separated by invisible barriers. Weird.

I should mention that the cops were all wearing their uniforms, as opposed to the riot gear-clad cops I’ve become used to. This made me feel more relaxed, although as a friend of mine said later “doesn’t make a difference. I’ve been beaten by uniformed cops too.”

Our noisy throng piled onto the north west corner of one intersection, and threatened to overflow it. Then– BAM. The cops give up, and let the protesters start marching down the street. No permit, no sanction, and we’re blocking traffic, but the cops seemed to accept that they couldn’t stop us.

It went on like this for dozens of blocks. Activists banging pots and pans, dancing and chanting (I’m no fan of chants, but I gotta admit that “Whose streets? Our streets!” is pretty satisfying), while the police try (and mostly fail) to corral us and determine our path. Protesters unveiled boomboxes in their handcarts, and amplified the music with bullhorns, making impromptu sound systems. Beachballs were inflated and batted around. The only real trouble we caused (that I saw, anyway) was when police tried to guide us into turning right, and we said “fuck that” and turned back the way we’d come. The police had already let cars drive back onto that street, so we were walking among, and interfering with, oncoming traffic. Hell, I guess we were traffic, in a way.

Around this time I headed for home, hoping not to fall asleep while driving. But I’m told the march lasted another hour or two after that.

So what was the point of all this, what did we accomplish? I dunno. I feel like I learned a few things about planning and tactics that might come in handy in the future. I was heartened to see people break the law, even if in a minor way, as part of a political protest. We shut down small parts of the city for small amounts of time. We had fun.

If there’s anything that the Iraq war should have taught us, it’s that big rallies and marches and celebrity endorsements will not change government policy. This is not a lesson that most liberals seem to have learned. They’re like the gangsters in the old 1950s Superman TV show who shoot their pistol at Superman, watch the bullet ricochet off his chest, fire another bullet, watch it ricochet away too, and then prepare to fire another bullet. A smart gangster would say “I’ve gotta get me a bigger gun.” A reallly smart gangster would say “I’ve gotta find me some green glowing rocks.” Well, let me take some of that back. We don’t have dumb gangsters, we have scared gangsters. Gangsters who know damn well that if they fire a bigger gun at Superman, then he might get pissed off and crush some heads. I guess the smart, scared gangster fires all six shots and then throws the gun at Supes, because they’d rather fail than get hurt.

If we want anything to change, we’ve got to take some risks. And this San Diego protest made me think that there are folks willing to do just that.

Pics of the event available at the link above.

[update]

I suppose I should clarify that in my Superman comments above, I am not actually saying that people should go out and buy guns and start shooting people. It was a simile, in which “gun” represents “tactic designed to bring about political change.” Regardless, I’m sure someone is going to quote me out of context and point out how those “hypocritical liberals” claim to be so peaceful yet advocate violence when they don’t get their way.

January 24, 2005

I have been to a number of grocery stores in southern California, and have found a puzzle.

Most upscale markets have in their produce section, an “olive bar”– a small table or display where you can choose from a wide variety of exotic olives. No other produce gets this sort of treatment.

I don’t like olives.

I don’t know anyone who has bought olives from these olive bars.

I don’t know anyone who is such a fan of olives that they seek out olive bars.

There seem to be only two explanations:

1) Unbeknownst to me, people really, really like olives.

2) An olive-growers association has entered into a business arrangement with upscale supermarkets to create these olive bars in effort to stimulate the sale of olives.

In only tangentially related “news”, I saw an imported British candy bar today, the “Yorkie”. The slogan, printed right on the wrapper is “Not for Girls.” And the “o” in “Yorkie” has a symbol of a woman with a line through it. My reaction, naturally, was to say “what the fuck is this all about?” A bit of research brings us this explanation from Nestle’s marketing director:

“We felt we needed to take a stand for the British bloke and reclaim some things in his life, starting with his chocolate… Most men these days feel as if the world is changing around them and it has become less and less politically correct to have anything that is only for males. Yorkie feels that this is an important part of men’s happiness and is starting the reclaiming process of making a particular chocolate just for men.”

Gotta be the first candy explicitly dedicated to the elimination of women’s rights.

Well, no, it isn’t. Those words are a bunch of fucking nonsense aimed at getting people to buy chocolate. Mr. Marketing Director’s speech isn’t about gender or empowerment or political correctness. It’s about sales.

January 22, 2005

Jon Stewart hit the good news right on the head: the George W. Bush presidency is now officially more than halfway over.

Believe me, by the time Bush is done invading Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba, privatizing social security, passing Patriot Acts 3-7, and declaring Jesus Christ our One True Lord and Savior, we’ll be looking for the tiniest silver lining, now matter how tarnished.

Although they didn’t get much news coverage, I was very proud of the widespread and the moremilitant protests that got about zero coverage in the mainstream media. The whole world was sympathetic to the average American during the first W administration, acknowledging that we hadn’t really elected him, or that if we had, that he’d lied about who he was in the campaign. Now that he’s really been elected (well, okay, “allegedly been elected”), after Americans had a chance to see the idiot wolf behind the star-spangled sheep’s gear, I fear the rest of the world is willing to say “okay then. It’s on!” I was hoping that angry, riotous protest was going to break out, so that folks in other countries could turn on their TVs and say “okay, I guess not all Americans like Bush,” and moderate their new hostility. I kinda doubt that it turned out that way.

Reading Bush’s inauguration speech makes my head hurt. It’s like you put a US history book in a blender, fed it to a monkey, and then smeared its feces on a teleprompter. It reads like a drunken war whoop written by Thomas Jefferson to inspire Conan the Barbarian. In short, Bush pledges that the way to make America safe is to defeat evil (and/or tyranny) everywhere in the world. Not that we’re doing it for our own sake, of course, we’re doing it cuz it’s the right thing to do.

Tyranny is the new terrorism, which was the new communism (which was, I believe, the new “get em, they’re foreigners!”). Tres convenient.

Of course, all this would be great, if the US had the resources, manpower, support of the rest of the world, and if Bush’s every spoken word wasn’t a total lie. US foreign policy has always been, and will continue to be, “do as we say.” If the foreign government in question happens to be a democracy, great. If they happen to be a tyranny, great. If they happen to be a tyranny that pretends to be a democracy, well hot damn!

This is not to bash the US too badly, this is just how governments are. They are amoral institutions who’s main tools are the threat of war and the threat of prison. No matter where you live, if you think that your government is “good”, you’re probably being suckered. All nations have committed their share of crimes, and should be judged accordingly. Let’s just say that if put on trial, Uncle Sam would be mighty sad that he’d supported the death penalty all these years.

And of course, what Bush speech would be complete without mentioning his main man, G-O-D? David Neiwert points us to this op-ed, which analyzes the frequency and character of past presidents’ religious rhetoric. They find that not only does Bush invoke his own personal Almighty more frequently than his predecssors, but that he does so in a different way:

Presidents since Roosevelt have commonly spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing, favor and guidance. This president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world.

If Bush is portraying himself as the spokesman of God, can’t we just nail him to something and be done with it?

January 20, 2005

A soldier in camouflage fatigues barked out the long list of items banned from the parade zone: No cans. No backpacks. No umbrellas. And no fruit, apparently an effort to keep protesters from hurling mushy missiles at the president’s limousine.

No fruit? The edict set off a mild panic among dozens of young volunteers for the presidential inaugural committee at the south entrance to Pennsylvania Avenue on 12th Street, who moments earlier had been handed bag lunches. Each contained a sandwich, candy bar, bottle of water, and a moist towelette decorated with an American flag motif. And an apple.

A few volunteers quickly dipped into the suddenly forbidden fruit, chewing and swallowing quickly. Others left their apples on a ledge– shiny red symbols of the most restricted inaugural in history. –Debbi Wilgoren

January 17, 2005

For some reason, my blog seems to have turned on “moderate comments”, and I don’t know how to shut it off. So if you post a comment and it doesn’t appear, wait a few hours for me to find it and greenlight it.

January 16, 2005

[At the inauguration]… parade performers will have security escorts to the bathroom, and they’ve been ordered not to look directly at President Bush or make any sudden movementswhile passing the reviewing stand.

“Do not look directly at the president?” What the fuck?

And as Bob points out, Civil War re-enactors will be part of the parade. “How, pray tell, do you re-enact the Civil War without making any sudden movements?”

Sorry for the continued blog absence. Still getting situated at the new residence.

The new job is pleasant, pays decent, and has me interacting with kindly co-workers. Next thing you know I’ll have a million new friends and will be the lampshade-wearing life of all the parties.

Unfortunately, it looks like I will not be getting the Phase II job I was hankering for. Ah well, minor set-back.

I might be starting a weekly column (or possibly something bloggish) over at the Axis of Justice website*. I’ll let y’all know if that comes to pass. I’ve been running that site for several years now, but it would be refreshing to get to post info there in my own voice.

I’ll try to return to regular blogging by mid-week. Nothing tomorrow cuz it’s my birthday, and I think I’ll be spending it at eating deadly breakfast foods, tasty pizza, or possibly feeding my Mongolian barbecue monkey. Some portion of the day will surely be spent on a beach, and maybe an aquarium.

I’m turning 30. I am a dinosaur.

I’ll also shamelessly post a link to my Amazon wishlist in case someone wants to hurl gifts in my direction.

Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll resume breathing fire shortly.

—
* Yes, I’m aware that the AOJ site currently looks like it has been hit by a time warp. Long story short, we finally switched to a new web company (yay!) but we need the old web company to give us the most up-to-date database files (boo!).

**And keep an eye on the DC anti-inaugural protests. It sounds like shit is gonna go down. And well it should. What does it say about us if this global monster takes office again and we raise barely a peep?

January 13, 2005

Amanda’s got a couple of great posts at Mouse Words about gender roles and male-female interaction.

The first discusses the popular belief that men have a higher sex drive than women do. This has seemed to be generally true in my personal experience, but Amanda points out that women are so strongly socialized to not speak about– or sometimes even recognize– their sexual desires, we don’t really have good “data” to figure out who’s hornier. Maybe huge numbers of women are hungry for sex, but are just too afraid to say so, which would mean that we don’t know which gender is the bigger horndog.

Amanda then briefly links this to the teen idol/boy band phenomenon, and when you put it in this context, it’s rather mind-blowing. Due to the taboo on female sexual desire, it is okay for a woman to say “that guy is hot”, but is not allowed to say “that guy is hot, I want to fuck him.” Therefore all of those screaming teen girls who’ve wallpapered their rooms in NSYNC posters are expressing their desire to have sex with these young men as openly as is socially permissable. Unless she’s jumping on the bandwagon (as some of these young ladies surely are), your 12-year old niece with the Justin Timberlake t-shirt wants to have sex with Justin Timberlake. Millions and millions of young women aren’t “crazy” about Justin Timberlake, aren’t “in love” with Justin Timberlake, but want to have mad hot naked sex with him. Somehow this passion has been stripped and mutliated until it looks like sexless attraction.

Which means that boy bands and teen idols are an entire industry based upon the suppression of female sexuality. You can’t have Josh Hartnett, you can’t say what you’d like to do to Josh Hartnett if you were alone in a room with him, but you can buy his posters and DVDs and whatnot*. That’s really sad.

I hope you get the jist of what I’m trying to say here. I know what I want to say, but as I type this, it feels like I’m missing something.

Amanda’s other good gender post is about “homosociality”, friendships between people of the same sex. To quote a bit:

“Homosociality (as explained so well in Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America) is the principle that all men, including heterosexual ones, are raised in our culture to be more eager to please other men than women.”

It’s so true that it’s invisible. What men will do to impress women is a joke in our culture, but what they will do to impress men tends to go even further, again especially amongst younger men.

This has baffled me for quite some time. Our culture is obsessed with male heterosexuality, and the logical result of this obsession would be for men’s lives to focus on trying to please women so that she would want to have sex with him. Yet somehow, the center of young men’s lives is more about pleasing and impressing their male friends, often to the extent that they are actually alienating women. You know how it is, some guys will insult their own girlfriend to their guy friends to somehow look cool. But actions to impress guys while driving away the person of the opposite sex that you could be sleeping with seems so anti-heterosexual.

I’m not saying that men should center their lives around seduction [wow, Freudian slip. I made a typo which created a new word: “seducation”], or that women deserve to be treated as such, just that such a lifestyle would be the logical conclusion to a culture so obsessed with male heterosexuality.

The quotes up there are the best explanation I can find for this, that as hetero-obsessed as our society is, pleasing other men is even more important.

Amanda does have the happy conclusion though: treating people based upon the quality and importance of your relationship to that person, not based upon whether they’re a man or a woman. Not as common a sentiment as I’d like.

Most of what I write on this site are reactions to and interpretations of current events. Occasionally, I will write about broader topics, or about concerns not explicitly tied to news of the day. For example, I believe I will be researching hunger and homelessness issues for one of my jobs in the coming months, which will surely result in some postings on the topic here.

While I’m thinking of it, are there any topics that you would like me to research and write about during the coming year? I can’t guarantee I’ll have the time or inclination to cover it, but it might spark some quality journalism.

January 9, 2005

I’ve got this theory that rain is not the specialty of southern California’s meteorologists.

This weekend was the last hurrah of the short-lived “move Jake out of his apartment” movement, but the weather reports all said it was going to rain. Well, it had actually been raining all week (and before), and I’d just been stuffing boxes into cars while getting pretty wet. I got very lucky and the rain happened to frequently died down just as I was headed out the door.

So we look at the weather report for the weekend: Saturday- Heavy Rain. Sunday- Rain. So Dad and I decide to do the big Furniture Move on Sunday to avoid the worst of the rain.

Cue California meteorologist motherfuckers.

Saturday ended up sporting long stretches of mist coupled with bouts of no rain, and only a couple of outright showers. It would’ve been as good a day as we could have hoped for in the midst of this unusually rainy season.

Instead, we ended up moving three tables, a dresser and a large sized bed in the middle of a fucking monsoon. We got drenched, and the furniture managed to get wet despite our wrapping each piece in several square miles of plastic (nothing that an evening in front of an electric fan won’t cure, but still…). Cars on the freeway were literally leaving wakes in their paths, like speedboats.

Okay, this whole thing is honestly my fault. “Let’s move the furniture even though it’s likely to rain” ranks near the top of the stupid scale, and it was my line. Bad Jake, no biscuit.

Super extra props to my dad for his beyond-the-call-of-duty yet desperately needed help on this Poisedeon adventure. I have taken one of his observations (which he repeated on this occasion) and turned it into folky wisdom: “rain’s not so bad when you remember it’s just water.”

Note to Jake’s LA friends: notice I didn’t make any of you help me move. Now that’s love.

Moving tip: if you’ve got stuff you simply want to get rid of, post an ad on the “free” section of craigslist. I announced that I was getting rid of some shelves and tables and stuff, and in three days I got over a hundred emails, a dozen phone calls, and eight visits from people wanting to take custody of my possessions. Nearly all of my unwanted stuff got taken. Merci beaucoup, craigslist people.

One more trip back and forth (through more rain, of course), and then I’m 5000. First day of the new job is Tuesday, interview for new job Phase 2 on Wednesday. Wish me luck.

January 8, 2005

January 5, 2005

Jeez, next time I decide to move, someone remind me to give away all my earthly possessions first. Every book, every box of crackers, every loose penny, you’ve got to interact with every single thing in your residence, whether it be to carefully pack it away or to hurl it into a dumpster screaming “Fuck you, dinner plate!”

Then you’ve got to get everything into boxes or bags, get all those boxes or bags into a vehicle, and then get them from the vehicle into a new space. It’s like Tetris, but with back pain.

I got a little mopey locking up my new place, looking at all the keys that I’d be getting rid of for my old apartment. Then I heard a seagull caw, and my grin lasted all the way to the freeway.

Lying Media Bastards is both a radio show and website. The show features news, angry commentary and excellent music. And the website, well, you're looking at it.

Both projects focus on our media-marinated world, political lies, corporate tyranny, and the folks fighting the good fight against these monsters.

All brought to you by your pal Jake Sexton. Jake is one of those writer, DJ, activist, anarcho, librarian types the movie stars are always talking about. Sadly, his currently overstuffed life prevents him from giving this site the proper obsessive attention it deserves

Media News

October 11, 2011

Recursive

Some years back, I wrote about my recent visit to Comic Con, the yearly pop culture mega-convention in San Diego. I did some critiquing of it, and “entertainment journalism” as willing accomplices/collaborators of the entertainment industry’s marketing machine. What was most interesting to me at the time is the way that secrecy built hype. You’re a big video game company, you’ve got a new game coming out in a year, but you hide all the details. Which makes all of the fans and “journalists” so hungry for news that they’ll jump at your tiniest leak or press release. This makes good tacticaly sense for marketers, but ends up being pretty insane for the audience.

And today, I’ve just seen the most ridiculous example of parceled-out hype in a while.

A big, new superhero movie called “The Avengers” is going to be released in the spring of 2012. And today, there was much pomp and giddiness for the release of the First Official Trailer. Remember, this isn’t the movie that fans want to see, this is a commercial for the movie. But that wasn’t enough. Yesterday, the television show “Entertainment Tonight” gave us all an “exclusive first look” at the commercial. For those of you who couldn’t wait 12 hours, the TV show showed clips of the commercial for the movie you actually want to see.

And that’s not all! One popular fan site gave readers a “preview” of the Entertainment Tonight segment! So you could watch a preview of the preview of the commerical for the movie.

I understand why the studios do this, and I sometimes get caught up in the spiral myself. Hell, there’s even some logic buried in there for the fans. But, objectively speaking, that doesn’t make it any less nuts.